"How deluded we sometimes are by the clear notions we get out of books. They make us think that we really understand things of which we have no practical knowledge at all."

—Thomas Merton

"In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time, the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and the material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream."

—Thomas Carlyle

"In that abyss, I beheld how love held bound Into one volume all the leaves whose flight Is scattered through the universe around . . . For everything the will has ever sought Is gathered there, and there is every quest Made perfect, which apart from it falls short."

—Dante

"In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you."

—Mortimer J. Adler

"All good books have one thing in common— they are truer than if they had really happened."

—Ernest Hemingway

"A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins."

—Charles Lamb

"Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counsellors, and the most patient of teachers."

—Charles W. Eliot

"If you can get the right book at the right time you taste joys—not only bodily, physical, but spiritual also, which pass one out above and beyond one's miserable self, as it were through a huge air, following the light of another man's thought. And you can never be quite the old self again."

—T. E. Lawrence

"As good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself."

—John Milton

"It will be the best-written books which are passed on to posterity. . . . Writing well also means thinking well, feeling well, and behaving well."

—Comte George-Louis Leclerc de Buffon

"I had already found that it was not good to be alone, and so made companionship with what there was around me— sometimes with the universe and sometimes with my own insignificant self; but my books were always my friends, let fail all else."

—Joshua Slocum

"There is more ado to interpret interpretations than to interpret the things, and more books upon books than upon all other subjects; we do nothing but comment upon one another."

—Montaigne

"There is more treasure in booksthan in all the pirates' loot on Treasure Island, and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life."

—Walt Disney

"The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts."

—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

"Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life."

—Mark Twain

"We need the books that effect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone. . . . A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us."

—Franz Kafka

"When you re-read a classic,you do not see more in the book than you did before,you see more in you than there was before."

—Clifton Fadiman

"Books are the flowers or fruit stuck here or there on a tree which has its roots deep down in the earth of our earliest life, of our first experiences. But . . . to tell the reader anything that his own imagination and insight have not already discovered would need not a page or two of preface but a volume or two of autobiography."

—Virginia Woolf

"The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, And all the sweet serenity of books."

—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"The profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart."

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Youth is a time when we find the books we give up but do not get over."

—Lionel Trilling

"There is something about the bookwhich fits the eye, the hand, and the mind: it has achieved a perfect form,which cannot be transcended."

—Jacques Barzun

"I've read all the books, but one only remains sacred: this volume of wonders, open always before my eyes."

—Kathleen Raine

"Every creature is full of God, and is a book about God."

—Meister Eckehart

"The world is a book, and those who do not travel, read only a page."

—St. Augustine

"A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine binding should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight."

—Robertson Davies

"The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and stengthens our most fatal tendency— the belief that the here and now is all there is."

—Allan Bloom

"A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe."

—Madeleine L'Engle

"Books—the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity."

—George Steiner

"A picture shows me at a glance what it takes dozens of pages of a book to expound."

—Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev

"The multitude of books is making us ignorant."

—Voltaire

"And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written."

—St. John the Apostle

"Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents."

—Arthur Schopenhauer

"No man can be called friendless who has God and the companionship of good books."

—Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"We all know that books burn—yet we have the greater knowledge that books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory. . . . In this war, we know, books are weapons."

—Franklin Delano Roosevelt

"You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. May you be in love every day for the next . . . 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world."

—Ray Bradbury

"In the best books, great men talk to us,give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours. God be thanked for books. They are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. Books are true levelers. They give to all, who will faithfully use them, the society, the spiritual presence of the best and greatest."

—William Ellery Channing

"Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill."

—Barbara Tuchman

"A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. . . . What I began by reading, I must finish by acting."

—Henry David Thoreau

"Each friendship and love is the ultimate journey where the soul is born and grows. The journey is the drama of the heart's voyage into the tide of possibilities which open before it. Indeed, a book is a path of words which takes the heart in new directions."

—John O'Donohue

"Life being very short, and the quiet hours few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books."

—John Ruskin

"Where My Books Go"

All the words that I gather,And all the words that I write,Must spread out their wings untiring,And never rest in their flight,Till they come where your sad, sad heart is,And sing to you in the night,Beyond where the waters are moving,Storm darkened or starry bright.

—W. B. Yeats

"For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past. The reason why men lived, and worked, and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives."

Earnest, naive, and shy with women, the Reverend Denson Roswell is the newly appointed pastor of the Mt. Absalom Baptist Church in the south Georgia town of Levidgville during the early 1960's. Instead of being a brimstone-spouting preacher who stirs his flock with sermons laced with hellfire and damnation, he becomes deeply embroiled himself with a temptress who answers his personals ad in an Atlanta newspaper, and then with a deranged, sexually aggressive church member. Tortured by the entrapments in which he unwittingly is immersed, Denson becomes convinced that all is hopeless and is consumed by guilt. Although deficient in worldly wisdom and good judgment, he eventually is saved, his redemption, in the end, coming from the most ungodly and surprising quarter. Derek Smith is a masterly storyteller, and here he weaves a fascinating tale full of colorful characters, set against a backdrop of life in the 1960's South.

A former journalist whose works have appeared in numerous newspapers and magazines, Derek Smith is a native of Bishopville, South Carolina, and a graduate of Georgia Southern University. He has written six books, including Civil War Savannah and The Sentinels (both published by Beil). He now lives in Williamsville, New York.